For some years, the moral outrage took the form of light parody. It's only really in the 18 18 95 that things take a darker turn. And te sort of latent discomfort with decadences challenges to sexual norms and victorian values become moral opprobrium. The newspapers had a field day when Oscar wild was reported to have been arrested carrying the yellow book,. He went to e the police station carrying it under his arm. At the same time, decadence was also being commodified in the homes of the new new bourgeoisie. While wild's plays were repackaging decadent ideas for the masses.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the British phase of a movement that spread across Europe in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. Influenced by Charles Baudelaire and by Walter Pater, these Decadents rejected the mainstream Victorian view that art needed a moral purpose, and valued instead the intense sensations art provoked, celebrating art for art’s sake. Oscar Wilde was at its heart, Aubrey Beardsley adorned it with his illustrations and they, with others, provoked moral panic with their supposed degeneracy. After burning brightly, the movement soon lost its energy in Britain yet it has proved influential.
The illustration above, by Beardsley, is from the cover of the first edition of The Yellow Book in April 1894.
With
Neil Sammells
Professor of English and Irish Literature and Deputy Vice Chancellor at Bath Spa University
Kate Hext
Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Exeter
And
Alex Murray
Senior Lecturer in English at Queen’s University, Belfast
Producer: Simon Tillotson